


all that's golden (is never real)

by Hinterlands



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Emotional Hurt, Nightmares, lena deals with some heavy feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-28 01:32:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8425519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinterlands/pseuds/Hinterlands
Summary: The truth of the matter is this; today, Lena is too tired to be a hero.





	

**i.**

Lena wakes in darkness, tongue thick in her mouth, fibrous-feeling, breaths coming in great, ragged, effortful gasps, and remains frozen, one elbow digging into the thin mattress draped over the unyielding wire of her bedframe, until her eyes adjust. For a moment, she fears the worst; that something fundamental has ground down to stillness, that she has been severed again from the motion of moments, the endless and indomitable ticking-on of time, and one hand gropes at the abraded skin of her chest, searching for the cold chrome of her chronal accelerator.

An arrested exhalation as her fingertips find the edge of it, smooth and cool and immovable, lungs struggling against a tide of relief. She cocks her head towards the space she knows the bedside table should occupy, the unending march of faded red ticker-tape across the display of her alarm clock. 4:17 AM, too early yet for the cold grey light of predawn, but sleep is nonetheless likely to elude her, now. Legs swung over the edge of the bed, darkness resolving itself into hazy alignment, the grey silhouette of the doorway, the solitary window, curtainless. No longer void, no longer unwelcoming.

 _I'm here,_ she reminds herself, silently and forcefully, as her bare feet just graze the cold wood of the floor. _I'm here. I'm here for good._

**ii.**

Lena dreams of being unmade again most every night; of being rendered incorporeal by a simple incompatibility with the forward motion of _time_ , unable to exist solidly, as flesh. There and gone again, words stretching between centuries, every simple motion--the rotation of the shoulder, the stretching of an arm, the opening of a hand to grasp, to plead--between millennia. At times, the world was a motionless blur, something seen but patently untouchable, and at others, positions could be changed in nanoseconds, the flicker of an eyelid, her insubstantial body slipping through the cracks between moments. Building filled and bustling; _blink_. Building deserted, thick with dust. She could not reconcile the futures she had seen and existed in, even only momentarily, and after a time, she simply stopped trying.

(She would return to her own time, always, but could not maintain herself there; Overwatch's scientists had found a way to roughly contain her, so that in all her pinging between months and moments she would not change position, and she was, at the time, appropriately, fervently grateful. She felt no urge to sleep, or to eat, and so existed in the margins of chronology with nothing to occupy her but the slow roil of terror, the creeping heaviness of despair, and even now, years later, she wakes with her teeth set, her jaw throbbing, biting back a wail.)

**iii.**

Lena maintains a small flat in London for the scant few weeks out of the year that her travels turn her homeward, and for the most part, it's cozy, but surprisingly barren; one bathroom, one bedroom, a small kitchen perpetually wanting for counter space (currently occupied by Lena's coffeemaker and a battered blender) spilling over into the den, where only a floral-patterned sofa and armchair sit, squat and gaudy, usually shielded by dust-sheets. Few electronics occupy her space; she maintains an (admittedly) paranoid fear that whatever frequencies they operate on will interrupt the function of her chronal accelerator in such close proximity, despite Winston's reassurances, and besides that, she keeps her valuables close at hand, tucked into the bottom of her bags.

She trudges into the kitchen, fits a filter into the coffeemaker’s wide, open mouth, scoops out a few careful spoonfuls of grounds; a cup of coffee is rote and ritual, though she’s self-aware enough to know that at least half of it will swirl down the drain by the time the hour’s up. The warmth of the mug is comforting, though, and it affords her something to do with her hands before the tremors (as they will, as they always have) begin to abate.

(She seats herself beneath the kitchen’s window, at the small, round table with its solitary chair, and takes patient, scalding sipsas the sky, gradually, begins to lighten; now grey, now barded in baby pinks, the sun not yet cresting the horizon, much less the peaks of the buildings crowding it. Eyes on the clouds scudding languidly across the sky, overhead and out of sight, she thinks, _it wouldn't be too late to renew my pilot's license,_ knowing that it very well is; that path is closed to her; that path is dust. Overwatch is gone, and has made no miraculous reemergence, and there are no other avenues remaining that would accept her as a former agent, as what she is. The chronal accelerator set into her chest is an indelible mark of her involvement, and she dares not risk exposing herself to the danger a government-sanctioned license would inevitably call down.)

**iv.**

She knows all this, and yet she allows herself, for a moment, while her coffee steams and cools on the table by her elbow, to pretend, to envision herself snug in the cradle of a pilot's seat, controls molded to her hands, cutting through the blue of the noontime sky at the speed of sound; there's a kind of freedom there that she hasn't found anywhere in this other, after-existence, shackled to the ground, bound to gravity.

**v.**

After coffee comes the shower, an adherence to routine that provides--if not complete stability, then at least the illusion of normalcy. There's a mirror affixed to the back of her bedroom door, and Lena watches herself undress, the inelegant motions of her arms and elbows; shirt, finessed around and off, the cool chrome of her chronal accelerator raising strips of gooseflesh on her chest. Shorts, next, and she finds herself repeating some frantic sort of mantra in her mind; _this is my body, this is my body, this is me. This is my body, and it's real, as real as anything._

This sense of disconnection is not unusual (has existed, has been intermittent, since the onset of her condition), but it is entirely unwelcome, as is the heaviness that accompanies it, the sensation of being outside of herself. Panic wells, but it does not belong to her, just as her body, in this moment, is not hers, cannot be hers, is nonexistent, is void and numb.

Still, she moves to slip out of her underwear, patiently roll down her socks, and pads heavily into the attached bathroom, the feeling of the cool tile underfoot at once immediate and far away. She could, theoretically, slip out of her harness, hang it nearby as she goes about her business, stay anchored to the present so long as she stays within its projected field, but she needs the weight of it at her chest, hanging from her shoulders, as much to stay present mentally as physically.

It can tolerate a certain degree of wetness, is capable of being submerged to a not-unimpressive degree, so she alternates short blasts of the (thankfully removable) showerhead with pale soap-lather, lifting the device slightly to get at the sweat-filmed skin beneath, forcing herself, bit by bit, through the motions of cleaning herself, of wetting her hair and lathering it up, of drying herself. The struggle has purpose, keeps her from slipping away, and so she resists the sensation of being somewhere _away_ , attempts to force herself back into her own skin, and largely, after a time, seems to succeed.

**vi.**

Lena cannot feel her own pulse beneath the steady thrumming of the chronal accelerator reverberating in her bones; today, as a concession to the latent heaviness, she permits herself to shed a few hot tears, alone in the midst of her steam-wreathed bathroom.

**vii.**

Afterwards, a return to stillness as feeling slowly seeps back into her limbs, dressed in a forgiving shirt, her shorts retrieved from her bedroom floor. Returning to herself always induces a peculiar sense of _rawness_ , and she fidgets where she's stretched out upon the floral sofa, eyes on the wall, one leg bent, foot on the cushion, her knee alternately swaying and bouncing. She should be _moving_ , she knows; she should be zipping between rooftops, blink by blink by blink, resplendent in brown and orange, seeking some right to wrong, but it's been too long since she last permitted herself to relinquish her grip on that drive even momentarily, to sit and breathe, to merely be.

**viii.  
**

The truth of the matter is this; today, Lena is too tired to be a hero.

**ix.**

She supposes she sleeps, or else falls into a sleeplike stupor; one moment, the day is new and bright, and when she next opens her eyes, the light filtering in through the kitchen window is a burnt orange, and the sun is sinking lower by the moment. After a moment, she hauls herself up, trudges to the fridge, and resolves to make herself a palatable supper with whatever she finds inside, which, upon further investigation, is not much; a quart of milk on the cusp of going bad, packages of deli meat. _No time to pick up groceries,_ she thinks, before swiftly correcting herself; _all the time in the world._

(She chuckles at that, despite herself, and, absurdly, feels just the slightest bit better, and she goes about the business of preparing herself two roast beef sandwiches with a fragile kind of buoyancy. She's had her time to rest, to process, and now comes the business of caring for the wreck left behind.)

**x.**

"I'm going out," she announces, afterwards, to no one in particular, dusting crumbs from the creases of her palms, fresh with resolve, and punctuates it by moving back towards the bedroom, to fetch her jacket. The leather is faded, cracking in places, the fur lining the inside of the collar long having lost its softness, but it provides warmth and comfort both, a kind of anchoring. She will go out; she will walk the streets in search of something resembling a good time, where light and life and booze convene, and she'll slip inside, and revel in the pulse of the congregation, the hard bass beat of it all.

(She'll find a girl to move with, move against, and maybe--just maybe--she'll invite her home, bring her across a threshold that's been too long without visitors; perhaps they'll fall into bed together, and she will touch, and be touched, and reaffirm what she already knows, what the ceaseless hum in her bones reassures her of, every moment.)

"I'm here," she tells the bone-pale face of the moon as the door swings shut behind her, no tremor in her voice, no hint of hesitation. "I'm here for good."

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written as a giveaway prize for a little contest held on overwatchwlw, but, after a point, I started getting far, far too into dissecting and compartmentalizing the emotional fallout (even so many years later) of Tracer becoming, essentially, chronologically undone, and--well, this resulted.
> 
> (I've inserted...a lot of headcanon material wrt how that chronal dissociation would work, mixed with some snippets of canon that Blizzard was gracious enough to give us, so please forgive me that.)
> 
> So, essentially, I hope you've enjoyed reading about a Tracer who's simply too battered to be cheerful--at least for one day; as always, thank you for reading, and feel free to hit me up either in the comments or on tumblr @ cassandrapentagay if you want to talk shop or make suggestions.
> 
> (Title is from "By The Throat," by Chvrches.)


End file.
